War Poets
Poems by soldiers of the First World War; Owen and Thomas were both killed in it.
- Fair warning, these are hard poems, gas attacks and boys dying in the mud, but Owen writes them with such tenderness that you come out feeling more human, not less. Strange Meeting alone, two soldiers talking in some underworld, will sit with you for weeks.
- You find ordinary things made quietly strange: a train stopping at Adlestrop, rain keeping a soldier awake, a road becoming a question about where you’re going. Thomas is spare, melancholy, and sometimes deliberately plain, but his attention to weather, walking, and loneliness lingers after the poem ends.
Includes Spirits in Bondage, 1919, written while Lewis served on the Western Front and recovered from his wounds.